I recently submitted the following research paper to my internship faculty sponsor at the University of Washington. Please feel free to comment, bash, praise, and discuss!
Publicity, Blogs, and Twi-Hards
Leah Bledsoe settled into her cozy office chair at around nine o’clock. Her desk is cluttered with the previous day’s work, and a colorful pile of sticky it notes wrinkle for her attention. She ignores them. Sipping a steaming cup of instant coffee, she spends the first hour of her day checking dozens of blogs tearfully authored by love struck teenage girls. She is not one of them. Leah is a publicist at Allied Advertising and Publicity, and she has spent the past three days building anticipation among a solid fan base for the premier of the film, “Twilight.”
The community of blogs that Leah is surfing is an example of social media; a category of participatory, user-generated media that has fundamentally changed the way public relations practitioners can effectively reach their stakeholders. My experience as an intern at Allied Advertising revealed three important points about how social media has impacted the field of film publicity. First, most segments of the population rely on their peers for information about films. Second, this rise of trust in peers is directly correlated with a rise in popularity of new communication technologies, also known as social media. And third, publicists now reach target audiences more effectively through social media outlets than through mass media advertising.
Social Media: Birth and Explosion
Before a discussion about social media, it is important to understand the conditions in which it rose to popularity. It is true that most segments of the population rely on friends for information about films, but it is also true that they rely on them for almost all news and information. Edelman Public Relations, one of the largest firms of its kind in the world, has published a multinational study of public opinion for the past nine years. This study is called the Edelman Trust Barometer, and is used by many public relations practitioners as a tool to understand how to influence public opinion. In the results of last year’s study, the Barometer found that trust has declined in spokespeople, government, mainstream media, and company advertising. At the same time, trust in “a person like me” has risen to rank among the highest routes of influence in a list of twenty-four categories. Perhaps even more revealing is that respondents defined “a person like me” as one with a shared interest or similar profession. Conversely, traditional demographic traits like nationality and gender are the least relevant to how people relate to one another.
“People in developed countries trust ‘a person like me’ more than almost any other resource of information.”
Allied Advertising and Social Media
Allied Advertising uses the results of the Trust Barometer in all of its publicity campaigns. They are currently promoting a new film entitled, “Hotel for Dogs.” As the name suggests, the film is about kids who convert an abandoned hotel into a home for the city’s stray dogs. To promote it, Allied plans to give out free tickets and merchandise to dog lovers through local retailers, veterinarian clinics, dog trainers, and a humane society. In line with Edelman’s findings, Allied will not promote the film by simply marketing to children. Instead, the goal of its campaign is to reach people who share a common interest in a way that contributes to that interest without being invasive. A second example of how Allied Advertising targets people with shared interests was its campaign for the horror film, “Quarantine.” To promote its October release, I developed partnerships with haunted houses, costume supply stores, and Halloween events in the Greater Seattle and Portland areas. These partners promoted the film by posting its trailer and logo on their websites, talking about it on their Internet blogs, and giving out free tickets and merchandise to customers. Both publicity campaigns were successful, because we effectively applied the ideas presented in the Trust Barometer.
There is no difference between “A Person Like Me” and “Social Media Communities.”
Edelman devoted a tremendous amount of resources to discover that young people rely on peers more than almost any other resource for information. In my opinion, however, the Trust Barometer was wrong to distinguish “A Person Like Me” from “Blogs” and other social media communities, which ranked low, in its comparison of sources of influence. By definition, a community is a group of people with shared interests who either live in the same place or are “scattered throughout society.” Therefore, a social media community is a community of individuals of common interests who interact through digital means and are scattered throughout society. If it is true that “a person like me” is a person of common interests, as the Barometer demonstrated, then there is no practical difference between “a person like me” and a social media community. Edelman made a distinction between the two which does not exist, or not to the extent which it suggests, and which suggests that social media has a lesser impact on the public mind than it really does. I refute it. The reality that people like on their peers more than almost any other source for information was the catalyst for social media’s meteoric rise in popularity.
“…there is no practical difference between ‘a person like me’ and a social media community…[Edelman's assertion] that the two are separate suggests that social media has a lesser impact on public opinion than it really does…”
RSS, Twitter, and the Social Media Infrastructure
Just as construction of a new highway makes it easier for people to reach a popular desination, social media has made it faster and easier for people to reach other people like themselves. In his new book, What is Social Media, media guru Antony Mayfield described how new communication technologies makes it easy for people to form online communities. “Today,” he wrote, “the ever-lower costs of computers, digital cameras, and high-speed internet access, combined with free or low-cost, easy-to-use editing software means that anyone can have a live blog website up and running within minutes of deciding to do so.” One communication technology, RSS, has been especially influential. Really Simple Syndication, a software product that has been integrated into most web browsers, enables a user to read selected blog headlines without having to visit any website. “The importance of RSS, therefore, is that it makes it much easier for social media to become part of communities,” said Mayfield. So easy, in fact, that 47 million new blog sites were created last year. Just like a new highway, RSS and other communication technologies represent a vast digital infrastructure which makes it fast and easy for people to form special interest communities. Communities of people just like them.
“Just as construction of a new highway makes it easier for people to reach a popular destination, social media has made it faster and easier for people to reach other people like themselves.”
To Engage or Not to Engage?
A respondent in a China Market Research Group survey about consumers and corporations aptly described the current media landscape. She said, “I believe bloggers and their ideas. They are my friends, and will tell me the truth. Unlike advertisements.” The fact that people have shunned advertising in favor of social media has forced a fundamental game change for public relations practitioners. In a departure from the era of clever television advertisements, practitioners now engage their stakeholders most effectively through social media forums. Brian Solis, a media theorist and public relations executive, described the advantages of social media participation. It allows companies to “cultivate a more significant community, build relationships, and create evangelists along the way.” Companies that disengage from social media do so to their detriment. “If you’re not part of the conversation, then you’re leaving it to others to answer questions and provide information, whether it’s accurate or incorrect. Or, even worse, you may be leaving it up to your competition to jump in to become the resource for the community… Negativity will not go away simply because you opt out of participating.” A company can truly enhance its reputation if it engages online communities as a humble participant which honestly seeks to contribute to conversations; not interfere in them with loud corporate messages.
“A company can truly enhance its reputation if it engages online communities as a humble participant.”
Brand Development and Publicity. Not So Much.
Solis advocated social media as a effective tool for brand development, but Allied Advertising uses it only to raise awareness about films. We abstained from using it for brand development for three reasons: time, money, and relevancy. First, we were limited by time. Cultivation of a positive brand reputation through social media is a long-term process, and the results are cumulative. “It’s not really feasible or a realistic use of time,” said field director Ginger Chan. “It takes a lot of attention and long-term effort. That doesn’t make sense for publicity projects where concrete results are usually expected in two to three weeks after we first get our directives from the corporate office.” Second, clients require earned publicity to have a dollar value. Industry leaders have been attempting to design a method for quantifying the value of social media engagement, but they have so far fallen short . Technorati’s model currently associates value with a site’s daily visits, but this is too simplistic. It would work if influence travelled in a linear fashion from publisher to reader, but influence in social media behaves more like a ripple in a pond. When an issue enters the social media agenda, it emits a ripple that influences many other things like debris and other ripples. These things, in turn, affect the original ripple. Technorati counts ripples and ignores all other variables. This is like assuming the pond is perfectly still and flat each time a rock hits the water. The third reason why Allied Advertising does not use social media for brand development is that film studios develop their brands using their films. “Most people can name one of the top three grossing films of all time. Titanic, Batman, and Star Wars. But most of the same people probably couldn’t guess any of the studios that released them if you put a gun to their head,” laughed senior publicist Leah Bledsoe. Allied Advertising uses social media to raise awareness about individual films, but it does not use it for brand development for time, money, and relevancy reasons.
Google, YouTube, and Forecasts to the Future
Two years ago, Google purchased YouTube for $1,650,000,000. Those zeros represent the degree of confidence which Google has placed both in the long-term vitality of social media and in its own effort to develop a profitable advertising model for social media. The first assumption is clear. Google’s acquisition of YouTube is a furtherance of its “mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Better accessibility means that social media will persist in one form or another for a very long time. Its meteoric rise, facilitated by a fundamental change in how people form opinions, knocked the field of public relations onto its knees and forced it to market to the public in different ways.
(C) 2008-2009. Julian Peregrine Jones.
